… Texts

Public Toilets and … is enjoying its Christmas holidays, which consists largely of visiting relatives and shopping. Consequently I am gaining new experiences of the public toilets found in trains and shopping centres, neither of which I have many qualms with. Bliss.

During the festive period my guest article on The Guardian’s Local Government Professional Network site was published, about the benefits of texting as a means of Public – Provider communication, using the City of Westminster’s SatLav system as an example.

Some addditional information that relates to the article can be found here:

The Department of Communities and Local Government’s case study publication on Community Toilet Schemes and SatLav

and here:

A picture of a sticker on a traffic light

Happy New Year.

Idea #5: Bus Timetables

I just did this for a presentation and figured I may as well put it on the blog. I’d half abandoned the ‘simple ideas’ aspect of this blog before I really began (I like to think that I’ve been working instead on much bigger fish) but I’ll try and add things that I do draw up as I go along.

After all, there really isn’t a ground-breaking idea that will solve all the problems of public toilets, but rather a lot of little improvements (that amount to little more than common sense!)

What are we looking at? The little public toilet symbols show which stops have public toilets (totally made up, by the way).

I spent yesterday at an Incontinence Conference, as you do, attended by many people from the Brunel Older Peoples’ Reference Group. They were quite frustrated by the lack of public toilet provision at transport hubs, in particular bus stations.

“Us older people, we travel by bus! We’ve got our bus pass but there’s no where to go to the toilet when we get there!”

(I paraphrase, but that was the gist.)

Would it be worth having information on bus timetables and bus stops that shows which stops are served by a public toilet?

Of course this assumes that there are some!

And as bus routes cross several local authorities, some data wouldn’t hurt either.

… Money, Cost & Value – Part II

As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to fund a toilet.

Having just exhausted the subject of charging the public to use the loos in “…Money, Cost & Value“, I’m going to move on to other ways of generate money, and more importantly, other ways of adding value. (Personally I’d skip the Money part…)

… Money, Cost & Value

**Postscript: What seems to have happened is that rather than covering ‘money, cost & value’, I’ve written 1100 words on whether you should charge people for the loo or not (??!). So let’s call this Part 1**

I’ve not posted in a while, because I needed to put more effort into doing something rather than just writing about it. It’s quite scary and I’m not sure that it’ll pay off, but at least I’m having a go…

Anyways, it’s Christmas soon and I really wanted to fit in a festive blog post on MONEY.

Funding public toilets is probably the biggest concern for councils (right now it’s their biggest concern for everything).  But there are ways that you can generate revenue from public toilets. And even more ways to generate value.